I am Sara J Matthews, Consultant Gynaecologist and Fertility Specialist in London.

Kassandra is a very special patient of mine, and her little newborn boy Landon is the first baby in the world to be born after transplantation of pieces of ovary that had been frozen for 23 years.

At that time the technique was still very experimental, but the only way to potentially preserve this young girls fertility before curative but sterilising cancer treatment that saved her life.

Kassandra is now 44 years old and has just had her first very much longed for baby after an incredible story.

Kassandra was just 19 when she was diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma.

She underwent chemotherapy and, fortunately, her initial treatment was not expected to cause severe damage to her ovaries.

But less than 2 years after her first diagnosis, Kassandra’s cancer returned.

To give her the best chance of curing her cancer, Kassandra needed a bone marrow transplant and the intensive treatment associated with it. That treatment carried a very high risk of permanently damaging her ovaries and causing a profoundly premature menopause.

In other words, the treatment that could save Kassandra’s life was also expected to take away her natural fertility.

Today, young women facing cancer treatment are routinely counselled about fertility preservation and techniques such as egg freezing are well established, but 25 years ago in 2001 the situation was very different.

Egg freezing then was very unsuccessful and rarely resulted in a pregnancy with the limited amount of eggs that could be stored. Removing and freezing ovarian tissue containing lots of immature eggs before Kassandra underwent her life-saving treatment was still regarded as experimental but it was the only way for her to potentially save her fertility.

Only a small number of specialist reproductive medicine centres in the UK were offering this pioneering approach to carefully selected patients. Cambridge was one of them, and I was the surgeon!

There could be no promise that Kassandra’s tissue would ever be successfully transplanted back, that it would function again after years in frozen storage, or that it could ultimately help her have a child.

Her ovarian tissue was frozen. Then the priority returned to saving her life. The high dose chemotherapy and autologous bone marrow transplant worked and Kassandra beat her cancer.

But, as anticipated, the treatment severely damaged her ovarian function and Kassandra entered a very premature menopause at 33 years old when she was ready to have a baby.

Her possibility of having her own biological child now rested in the ovarian tissue that had been removed before treatment.

Years later, that experimental hope became a possibility.

Medicine moved forward. What had been regarded as an experimental fertility-preservation technique when Kassandra’s tissue was frozen gradually developed into an accepted clinical treatment.

Years later, Kassandra was ready to find out whether the decision made when she was 19 might actually give her the chance of becoming a mother.

That would involve another extraordinary medical and financial journey.

Although the NHS had paid for the removal and storage of the tissue all this time, no NHS hospital was allowed to transplant it because it was frozen before the regulations about the procedure were introduced into clinical practice. Kassandra personally approached several teams in the UK and also in Belgium over 8 years but no-one would agree to transplant her frozen tissue.

Finally a referral to Miss Matthews in London, who had successfully used similar tissue changed Kassandras future. I contacted my good friend and colleague Professor Dror Meirow at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv Israel. The expertise of the Israeli team with this technique is renowned worldwide. Professor Meirow agreed to accept and transplant the tissue for Kassandra. Her frozen ovarian tissue had to be specially transported from Bourn Hall Fertility clinic in Cambridge, where the head embryologist Martin Blayney who froze the tissue, had been guarding the tissue all these years.

Kassandra then travelled to Israel for surgery to have the tissue transplanted back into her body. The surgery was originally scheduled 2 weeks after the war broke out in 2023 and so had to be delayed by a year until it was safe for her to go there.

She and her family had to pay privately for the specialist transportation of the tissue, the surgery and hospital treatment, flights and accommodation. After her operation, Kassandra had to remain in Israel until she had recovered sufficiently and it was medically safe for her to fly home.

And then something remarkable happened.

The ovarian tissue that had been frozen when Kassandra was 19 began functioning again.

The experimental procedure she had agreed to all those years before had done what everyone had hoped might one day be possible.

It restored ovarian function.

But restoring her ovarian function was only the beginning

Kassandra and her long term partner subsequently needed further fertility treatment, including investigations, medication and 3 rounds of IVF with Miss Matthews.

Kassandra had her positive pregnancy test after transferring her second embryo on Christmas day 2025. The rest is history. The pregnancy was smooth and a healthy Landon David Bacon was born on Wednesday 9th September 2026 weighing in at 8lb 4 oz.

Mum and baby are both doing well!

This has been a truly special and very long personal journey for Kassandra who despite numerous seemingly insurmountable obstacles, kept perservering in the hope that she could receive the help she needed.

Over the years, Kassandra and her family have funded this extraordinary medical journey privately. Her mother has contributed substantially, and Miss Matthews paid for one of her IVF cycles, but the combined cost of specialist treatment, transporting ovarian tissue internationally, surgery and hospital care in Israel, flights, accommodation, medication and IVF has placed enormous financial strain on the family.

Why we are asking for help?

There is a limit to what one person and one family can finance.

We are now asking for help towards the cost of Kassandra’s fertility treatment, including IVF, medication, investigations and associated medical care.